My coffee may have ground to a halt, pun intended, but the photographs are still being taken. My grinder has an issue, but more on that another time.
I picked up a VGA CRT monitor for free this weekend, to save it from being “recycled”, whatever that means in 2021. It’s a Sony Trinitron, which offers the same resolution as this DELL I am staring into to write this post. It’s also smaller, so the pixels really are compressed nicely, and you get some lovely scanlines and colour.
The reason I collected it is to hook up my SEGA Dreamcast and some future projects, to a display better suited to that era of gaming. Games pre c.a. 2005 really do look markedly better on old CRTs, for some reason. They just render really nicely.
The game I am playing is one of the last games released for the SEGA Dreamcast, and now commands prices of hundreds of dollars on the used market (e.g. eBay). It’s a brilliant game, and though it’s possible to emulate, there’s something very “present” about using the old hardware as it was intended. Kind of like classic cars, but computing.
I knew these photos wouldn’t come out so great due to the scanning nature of CRTs, but you can still see how fantastic this looks… on 20 year old hardware. The progress in the 90s was huge in my opinion, compared to the changes in the last 10-15 years. There’s plenty more rant on this topic to look forward to, but until then, here’s a glimpse of my weekend.